Freezing temps + Good food + Friends + A LONG drive home = Our trip to Toronto!

This past Friday we went to Toronto, Canada for the first time!  Dan (the pastor of Restoration Church) and his family invited us to come along with them to spend the day in the city.  Buffalo is only 1.5 hours from Toronto, which is super exciting.  Toronto is such a cool city!  It's really big and has a New York City feel to it.  The only downside of the day was that it was unbearably cold (temp in the 20s, wind chill much worse), so walking around outside was not something we wanted to do a lot of.  I did, of course, take lots of pictures though.

Here is one of our "warm-up breaks" we took in random stores as we walked around the city.  This was a mattress & furniture store that we warmed up in for a bit.

Then after more walking, we went to Allan Gardens, which is a botanical garden/greenhouse downtown.  This is the outside, and please notice all the snow!

Allan Gardens was definitely beautiful, but probably the best part about it was it was about 80 degrees in there!  It was glorious and we stayed in there for quite a while soaking it in.

Here is a shot of the Trippie family - Dan, Gina, Sam, and Nick.

Gina and I with the cacti:

After that we wanted to head to another part of the city, but were pretty tired of walking.  So we found a cab that would let all six of us get in together!  Wes got shotgun, so he took this pic of all of us squished into the back seat:

Of course we had to have some afternoon Starbucks!

We went inside one of the huge, beautiful churches to look around.  It reminded us of Paris and London!

For dinner we went into Chinatown!

We ran into a local and asked him where we should eat, and he recommended a place that turned out to be sooooo tasty.  Check out our spread:

Here I am trying to work the chopsticks.  This was the first and only bite I had with them - way too much work.

Group shot at the restaurant with one of our servers under the lovely orange(?) tree:

We had a really great day.  The end of the trip went a bit awry though....  So like I said earlier, it's only 1.5 hours from Toronto to Buffalo..... however..... it ended up taking us almost 5 hours to get home!  Dan was driving us, and on our way home we were going to make a stop at Ikea.  He got off at what he thought was the Ikea exit, turns out it wasn't, so he got back on the highway.  Then ME of all people - the most directionally challenged person in the car - noticed that we had been driving for about two hours and hadn't even gotten to the U.S. border yet.  So I mentioned this, and everyone kind of started wondering as well.  We stopped at the next exit and the guys went in a restaurant to find out that we had been driving west for over an hour instead of south!  We were almost to flipping Detroit!  We had already been driving for two hours, and now we had almost three more to go to get back to Buffalo.  Well, we had a lot of laughs about it - made lots of fun of Dan - and finally made it home.  Boston was not happy with us, but all was well.  We're also very excited to go back to Toronto when the weather is warm!!